Category: Domestic Life

Other worlds

Off in my own little one this morning, writing mush, just heartfelt mush for Brad and Omar. There are more ways to say I love you than there are stars in the universe. If it were not so we would not keep proving it, we lovers.

There’s no cream, so I’m eventually going to have tea. I’ve already played with Buster and brushed him, gotten some 90 Micron into me, written four hundred new words, had an entirely pain-free morning widdle – which only happens about 30 percent of the time so hey, we must grab these little happinesses as they go by is this not merely a truism but a mechanism by which daily life may in practical terms be a-accomplished?  she stammered… the keyboard barfed up an a so I stuck a hyphen in there and called it done.

I can go from piss to philosophy in seconds, so, do not try me, world! I have the words to roll you back again.

I find myself very blank and unthinking in most ways though. I am pressed on all sides by anxiety, and it is not all my own. So I think this feeling of blankness is an accommodation; if I am not reactive I won’t be making as much trouble. Of course, past a certain point, absence from human affairs starts taking you backward. I’ve spent my whole life, literally my whole life, trying not ‘to have it all’ but ‘to have all that I could reasonably attain without destroying myself as a creative being’, which involves a lot of decisions.

Having children never seemed like a decision. It was ordained. I felt it then, I felt it again as I typed it. The horror of childrearing and bearing that many modern women feel now is alien to me, but not anathema. I was among the last women who didn’t have reproductively impactful amounts of forever chemicals in my body during my pregnancies, so I remove myself from the pool of people who get judgy on modern women not wanting to have babies.  I have always been vocal in my support of the childless by choice. I understand the demographic arguments against the falling birth rate, and I reject them as propertarian and against self-interest (in planetary capacity terms). If I as a science fiction writer can posit three or four different social responses to a globally crashed birth rate (which is inescapable for reasons of deteriorated human health), each with their costs and benefits, how many responses can a whole nest of human civilizations come up with, depending on how resources are deployed? I still have hope, despite the countability of life.

Poems and songs turn over in my belly. something in there is wrathful, and something sad

it’s just gas

my brother said

Emotionally charged

Yeah, it was a day of emotionally charged phone calls. May it all be well. It was a relief candidly to talk to Dave D on the phone and just be shooting the shit about commonplaces.

Alex was here and we recorded (I managed to record me farting and Alex’s subsequent howl of outrage was so funny I put it all on loop and then the two of us nearly died laughing.) We never did manage to get down the road to Paul’s.

Lovely night of sleep, I have my mug of tea  and a light repast and my marching orders for the day (call landlord about the dryer again) and Alex’s calendar for next week (early dismissal on Wednesday!)

Later:

533 words on Yaks are Not Admitted Past This Point

Jeff will be home sometime this afternoon.

 

 

sorry I missed a post yesterday

Good thing I won’t have to do this – being this blog-  more in a couple of months. Yup, After November 16th it will be THE PRIVATE DIGEST OF ALLEGRA SLOMAN, sent specifically to you for your deletion, consumption, or hoarding for later, being a week’s worth of my ramblings, including whatever I’ve been writing in terms of fiction as a subsection ALWAYS WITH TRIGGER WARNINGS. I mean, if you don’t want to read smut, you would want a warning. If I’m never leaving the house I might as well be able to prove I’ve been busy, even if it’s for such a low life enterprise. You’ll even get my game scores so you can track my cognitive decline, what could be more exciting.

Alex continues to be wonderful. He got to interact with his other Grammy yesterday because SUZANNE was here and the enshinening happened, and she got emailed the entire ms for Totally Boned.

I get him for the whole day today. Childcare for an ADD family involves having the child tell you about the PRO-D day because his mom forgot. Katie is BUSY past ENDURANCE these days. She was apologetic and Suzanne and she and I stood on the front stoop laughing and hollering like trailer trash while two men of colour glared at us from across the street. White women, I tell ya. Anyway I’m going to take him

In other ‘that side of the family’ news, Unca Steve got two tags this year, one for a moose and one for an elk. (Dax is up there hunting with him right now which will also partly account for Katie’s state, since he pulls weight at home.) Anyway another hunter had a moose tag and gave up in disgust and gave the tag to Unca Steve and Steve bagged one and will get a cut of the carcass. (Unca Steve is a “this harvested animal will be consumed as food” kind of hunter.) So he got three tags for the price of two and his reputation as the family Nimrod is secure. (in the old as opposed to the cartoon sense of the word.)

Completed my rewatch of S1 GOmens but have not watched anything else since Jeff departed.

One of my music fans messaged me yesterday about a song, to tell me it meant a lot to him, and that was …. honestly so sweet and welcome.

Intelligent readers will skip the next paragraph / wall of blithering text. re fanfic.

The new Good Omens fanfic is posted on A03. I am going to retire the rest of the destiel fic I was working on (we’re talking a number of words not unadjacent to 300K of work, if I’m including the 200K unfinished doorstop ‘The Sword That Cries ‘Ruin!” which has the single best Own Character from all my fanfic, in my view, an ancient creature representing herself as a woman (she’s actually a sentient tree, of a species with a heritage older than earth because she’s ‘not from around here’ and she falls in love with Sam and he has to bury her in the ground so she doesn’t die because of her species’ life cycle, and it’s just so tragic and amazing and sad and glorious and beautiful and the smut I wrote about their goodbye tryst (have sex with me now and bury in the morning LOL) is so pure and awesome and then she wakes up twenty years later after her transformation and, because Dean’s been peeing on her grave (he HATES HER thinks she RUINED SAM’S LIFE) every time he’s at the bunker to visit Sam, when she wakes up she’s a foot taller. the explanation for this is also molto hilarious. I further wrote a crapstack of stuff about the hunter kids Cas and Dean adopt, one of whom takes on Crowley IN HELL and bests him (different Crowley – there’s a Crowley in Supernatural AND Good Omens.) Although it has been pointed out in tumblr that a) both Crowleys USE THE SAME THRONE – the side by side pics are HILARIOUS) AND B) AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, THE SIGIL IN THE CENTRE OF THE CIRCLE THAT AZIRAPHALE WARDS IN S1 IS A COMPLETELY MADE UP SIGIL FROM SUPERNATURAL – NOT EVEN ENOCHIAN – which according to rumour ‘was not deliberate’ which is the single funniest thing I have ever heard in my life about crossover media, whether or NOT IT’S TRUE.  AND in ‘Ruin’ THERE IS A TALKING CAT NAMED FELIS CATUS WHO IS ACTUALLY AN ALIEN WITCH’S FAMILIAR AND GETS HIMSELF PREGNANT AND GIVES BIRTH TO SENTIENT CATS i mean this story has damned close to every wacky witch trope I could jam down its gullet and parts of it are so terrifying and hilarious it’s among the best I ever wrote, AND THERE’S A LOT OF HIGHLY TECHNICAL B&D SEX BETWEEN CAS AND DEAN AND DISCUSSIONS ABOUT HOW IT’S HARD TO HAVE A GOOD DOM SUB RELATIONSHIP WHEN YOU’VE GOT TEENAGERS CRAWLING IN AND OUT OF YOUR HOUSE DAY AND NIGHT). Yeah. You can understand why I need 200K words for that.                                           BUT I was thinking of just plain deleting it all – good and bad – off Scrivener as a sacrifice to Erato, but who knows, maybe the sparkle will come back. I’m only four or five thousand words from the end of ‘Ruin’ but I can’t bring myself to unfray the knot.

I believe I’ll enjoy writing Brad and Omar stories more, anyway. I love my lively lads. They’re on a farm in Eastern Ontario right now, thinking about putting up a yurt. And yaks. Brad’s going to have a ‘newborn yak adventure’.

 

 

 

 

concern

I spoke to Keith earlier, he’s doing okay.

Alex is here, I just made him cake in a cup. I told him he only gets it on Friday now, and a different after school snack the rest of the week.

Paul’s comms problems continue. He can be reliably gotten on his home phone thank goodness.

BUSTER CAME OUT AND APPROACHED ALEX. Alex got a chance to give him some treats to cement the acquaintance.

Ren is at a sleepover at Alex’s new place. Alex was thrilled; earlier in the day he thought he wasn’t coming and he was in the car when Katie pulled up!

pOp is doing better, possibly needs to eat some more.

 

Good morning!

Alex was let in by Grunkle Jeff this am, I was so TIRED from getting up at midnight and then NOT being able to fall back asleep so that was embarrassing, kid standing on the stoop wondering where the hell I am.

We played on the Kaossilator and on various musical instruments this morning so I’m not just playing on my computer and sitting next to him all the time I’ll have you know!

Spoke to Keith, he saw Paul yesterday and things are not cool on the phone front but we knew that.

Leo was 80 this week. Congratulations, revered family elder!

1422 words yesterday. Only 150 so far.

Laundry from yesterday is folded and put away.

Saw Suzanne briefly yesterday for tax and computer stuff with Jeff, it was lovely to see her and she recounted cleaning Keith and Ben’s apartment for the first time and that was definitely funny and not repeatable.

I end this with a heartfelt wish for the early amelioration of the conditions of my pOp and Ontie Mary.

 

I need coffee

378 words yesterday, and as is typical as soon as I get to the end (ish) of writing one novel another one presents itself. begging to be wrote

This is how it presented itself IN THE MIDDLE OF A TB SCENE

Dying gods.

The words echo. The words are not even a map, although they are a key. Words keep destroying our morality. Only deeds restore it. The messages you hear? They’re real. The gods who speak them are real. They’re also dying, and untrustworthy, and malicious as demented fuck.

The feeling when you’ve been given a ‘randomly selected’ opportunity offered by the provincial government to comment on things like racism in BC and you’re the only white people on your block…I mean, there may be other people who are white living on our Street but they do not look that way to me.

Alex again today and tomorrow. I have some stuff I have to do for Paul, wish me luck. Car’s insured. Buster stayed in the doorway looking at him yesterday for 20 whole seconds.

Load of laundry yesterday.

Can’t shake this utterly horrific feeling of impending doom, Pop is home from hospital and yet I can’t stop thinking the worst.

One of the non binary Indigenous people I follow on twitter had an elf-bear-baby on September 3 with their Indigenous love and they just posted a pic of the baby’s elf ear and I am dying of the cuteness. So you can see after posting the above thought I went looking for a styptic against the cuts of the world.

Alex again

Very peaceful stay. Buster of course is not happy.

672 words yesterday. Brad and Omar burst into song and how on earth do you respond to that as a reader why by reading more. Just remember folks, neurotypical people DO NOT BURST INTO SONG. I feel so sorry for people who can’t.

pOp still in hospital, Mary’s rehab continues, mOm is very downcast by his continued absence but she did get the laundry done.

a few words

676 words so far today IT’S SO FUZZY

lovely call with Dave last night. His cat was yelling about his hairballs in the background; he sounds like a siamese with his tail being run through a woodchipper, poor lamb.

vivek ramaswamy has actually come right out and stated that ‘human flourishing requires fossil fuels’ and thousands of indigenous nations across the planet say mmmm no fuck you along with hundreds of millions of climate aware school aged children….

 

Alex is not here

And Buster is back to his old self. I brushed him for a long time and played with the ‘birdy’ with him and gave him snacks, both yesterday and today. For whatever reason he asked me to close the cat door around four this morning, so I did.

only a hundred words so far. Everything I write seems like hot garbage so it’s hard to turn up the spigot

I think I really need a cup of coffee, my body is screeching for it.

Still thinking about the Barbie movie. I told mOm about it. I wish to gestate the ideas a bit longer, after my heartfelt bleatings to mama

I really enjoyed having Alex. I have to talk to Katie about what’s happening next week.

Just looked up Merryn Tate, our midwife. She’s moved back to Aotearoa and is still a practicing midwife.

 

 

house is cleaner

Of course, from the outside this house looks like a teensy little yellow hell-hole, covered in algae and arrayed in rotting concrete.

Suzanne and Alex and Katie and me all got to be in the same room at the same time yesterday so that was nice. Jeff kept gaming and gritted his teeth through the noise.

Must run the dishwasher, there’s no decent clean cups.

Buster is still hiding from Alex but progress is being made.

Just wrote the single funniest line of description I’ve ever written in my life. Don’t worry beta readers, you will know it when you see it. 553 words yesterday.

No news is good news from the recovering elders.